Flat-Panel Glut Hits Best Buy

[sevenGLR]

Post on Wall Street Journal MarketBeat blog, although I'm not sure what he means when he says consumers aren't buying "because they don’t like the picture-in-picture thing"

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2008...hits-best-buy/

[eljay]

Yeah, that doesn't make sense...

Since there are few customers out purchasing several flat-panel televisions because they don’t like the picture-in-picture thing ...

[vmpv]

Perhaps this is a poor way of describing the Black Bars associated with SD channels?

[57]

Perhaps it's the fact that few of today's TVs do PiP/PoP, or it's limited to specific inputs, or requires separate devices, etc. In the analogue days it was easy to do PiP/PoP on many TVs (either using two tuners in the TV or with a VCR), today it's not (although some STBs like the SA8300HD have (limited) PiP).

Edit: OTOH, vmpv could be right since that's a simpler explanation, although that wouldn't account for some TVs being singled out.

...several flat-panel televisions...

Perhaps someone did a bad edit in the article?

[wbarbour]

Another interpretation could be that he's trying to be facetious, saying that individuals don't buy two flat panels and set them up side-by-side just so that they can avoid using PIP because they don't like the feature. (Two TVs - Two pictures instead of PIP on one TV). If everyone hated PIP and could afford it, they'd buy two flat panels. That would help BB and their inventory glut.

To me it's an odd way of trying to explain something that's contributing to the glut of flat panel inventory.

[JohnnyG]

wbarbour, that's exactly what the reporter is saying. He's joking that not very many people buy multiple TVs just to avoid using the PiP function. It's a pretty dumb joke, but that's what he means nonetheless.

[57]

Ah, That's probably it. They should have said "2" or "2 for the same room" instead of "several", then we might have understood the joke.

[jumpy27]

That is exactly what the writer was trying to say. That "since people won't be buying more than one flat-panel TV because they hate the way the PIP blocks part of the screen and is so tiny", there is now a glut of flat-panel TV's. He was being sarcastically funny.

[57]

But PiP is not available, or basically unusable in most of todays flat panels, so the joke makes no sense and it was poorly worded since it took several people to figure it out.

[JohnnyG]

Since it would take an entire article in the WSJ just to explain how PiP is different today than it was in the past, it would have been even harder to parse had he been making such a reference.

[57]

I suppose that the joke is more easily understood by those who don't know much about HDTVs, the target audience.